The NEAR Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for the development of the NEAR protocol, has unveiled a partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the data storage and computing division of Chinese tech giant Alibaba. A collaboration that is aimed at expediting the growth of Web3 in Asia and the entire Middle East region.
In this partnership, NEAR Foundation will be allowed to access Alibaba Cloud’s extensive developer ecosystem across Asia and the Middle East. This access is intended to attract more developers to create on the NEAR protocol. Therefore, developers who are looking to launch new NEAR validators can now use Alibaba Cloud’s “plug-and-play” infrastructure as a service, thanks to the new partnership.
The coalition of NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud will as well offer remote procedure calls (RPC) as a service to developers and users within the NEAR ecosystem. RPC is a type of computer server that lets users to read data on blockchains and send transactions to various networks. Also, the partnership will provide multi-chain indexing to offer a data-query application programming interface (API) to developers.
Additionally, Users will have the ability to use the NEAR Blockchain Operating System (BOS), a platform launched earlier this year that allows developers to build and interact with other users while utilizing Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure.
Following the announcement of the partnership, the price of NEAR upped by 8% to $1.57 on Monday. This however comes on the heels of Alibaba’s recent appointment of its new Chairman, Joseph Tsai, who is an active Web3 investor and has signed numerous agreements with crypto-related entities.
Raymond Xiao, head of international Web3 solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, stated, “The NEAR Foundation and Alibaba Cloud partnership is an important one as we continue to support Web3 developers to explore opportunities. It is also significant for developers and validators in the Asian markets, as they can leverage Alibaba Cloud’s comprehensive infrastructure in Asia.”
